Thought Leadership
Transforming Digital For The AI Era
Collaborating with software engineers to enrich engagement with highly technical content.
A lot of startups get up and running without having established a clear marketing or editorial function in-house. Entering into such a situation can be daunting, especially for those of us who identify with the methodical, detail-obsessive skill sets in our toolkits. Building a bridge from old content or messaging to renewed, sharp, relevant work is a balancing act that requires patience, surgical precision, and a clear understanding of the key pillars in that client’s value proposition.
Key notes
- Pair technical writers with domain experts for a wider reach.
- Establish editorial guidelines for message consistency.
- Workshop content refreshes to maximize time allocation.
Recently I took on a contract position producing highly technical thought leadership articles and white papers for a consulting firm that specialized in architecting software platforms. Prior to having a technical writer in-house, lead engineers and developers had produced their content. I was brought in to help develop those dev-driven stories into pieces that would engage a broader audience and deftly accrue to the firm’s core values.
I loved interfacing directly with the devs on their work. Each project required a different level of ghostwriting or guidance on my part, and bringing each author’s voice to life on the page was an incredibly rewarding creative experience. I’d worked on so much high-level tech material over the years, it was also exciting to be closer to the details of how technology solves business challenges; instead of optimization and acceleration, these stories drilled down into the word of dev containers and micro frontends.
For one project, however, the authors were no longer there. I’d been tasked with assessing a number of white papers the firm had published in its early days, to assess what type of revisions would be required in order to bring each paper up to date and implement the editorial style guidelines we’d been establishing post facto.
After delivering my assessment of the level of work that might be required for each, leadership agreed that one paper looked especially ripe for a squeeze: a guide to data-driven platform architecture. Topically more relevant than ever, but as the paper had been originally published prior to the recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, it had fallen quite out of date. Because the firm’s emphasis on taking a platform approach to software implementation was sound (a valuable tenet that’s helped it gain a competitive foothold in going all-in on AI), the bones of the piece were still strong enough to potentially withstand a thorough overhaul.
Workshopping with the firm’s brilliant and most senior engineer was an invigorating experience, as we identified all the areas of this paper where the architecture guidance detailed would need to be revised or rewritten altogether. The introduction, transitions, and industry context had to be revisited. Not least, the incorporation of countless revisions would be necessary to establish consistent style and editorial practices that without editorial involvement, simply had not been a concern at the time of the original publication.
Putting the finishing touches on this project, I revised the landing page to gracefully address these updates and tie the work to current research and industry trends. In less than half the time it would have taken to write a new paper altogether, we produced a timely, polished piece that articulates the evolving impact of advanced AI on the data-driven enterprise.